The Curious Case of Humanity in Magic the Gathering

Quick: name the most common fantasy race in the genre.

Did you say Elves? Dwarves? Orcs? Goblins?

Wrong. It's the one so obvious that you don't even think about it: Humans.

Yes, given that most authors are humans, it makes sense that if we want a relatable character, we tend to imagine a human first. Indeed, it's even somewhat less common to tell fantasy stories from the perspective of non-human characters.

One could argue that the quintessential, genre-defining fantasy work, Lord of the Rings, does this, and I think that's a valid argument. But in Tolkien's mythos, the Hobbits who serve as protagonists to his grand tales (I'd argue Sam is closer to the real protagonist of LOTR than Frodo, but it applies in either case) are actually just an off-shoot of humanity - sharing common ancestors while Elves and Dwarves were created separately.

But Humans are everywhere. In RPGs and other fantasy games, humans usually don't have a lot of big strengths or weaknesses - their diversity and adaptability tend to be emphasized in more recent works (Mass Effect, while Sci-Fi, fits these tropes quite well.)

In Magic the Gathering, humans are probably the most common creature type. But it was not always this way.

A lot of things changed when I was in my senior year of High School. This was when Magic ditched their old card frames to use the new, sleeker ones that have since become just what Magic cards look like. The change came with Eighth Edition, which came out on Magic's tenth anniversary. If you're a more recent player, you probably know the old frames as these weird relics of an earlier era, but I'll tell you that for those of us who had been playing Magic those past ten (or nine in my case) years, this was mind-blowingly weird. The sleek contours and smooth text boxes felt weirdly sci-fi compared to the old stuff we had - like how Black cards used to have what looked like aged parchment for text boxes or Green had what looked like a plank of wood.

But the other strange thing was that all of a sudden, there were humans.

Now, humans have been around since Magic began, obviously, but they were always defined by their "class" creature type. Soldiers, Clerics, Knights, Wizards, Druids, Shamans, and the like were all just assumed to be human unless they were combined with a race like Elf. If you had any cards that let you determine creature types, you'd pick one of those rather than human.

But the designers felt, in retrospect, that that was weird. Humans are just as much a unified species as elves or goblins, so why not allow that?

In the next expansion block, Mirrodin, they leaned into this - even on a plane where everyone was partially metal, and thus much less conventionally human (or goblin, or elf.) Each color had a type of human - the Auriok for White, Sylvok for Green, Vulshok for Red, Moriok for Black, and Neurok for Blue.

It took them ten years, but they added humans to the game. They then had to start issuing errata on ten years' worth of cards to give them new creature types. This would happen again in the very next block when Kamigawa turned "Legendary" into a supertype (which had sort of already existed thanks to Legendary Lands, introduced in Legends along with Legendary creatures) as well as adding the keyword Defender to divorce creature type from any implicit rules (previously, Walls had been the only creatures with an implied Defender keyword. We got our first sentient, humanoid defenders in Kamigawa.)

What's interesting about this change is that it actually allowed them to do some interesting new things, flavor-wise.

Lorwyn and Shadowmoor, an unconventional four-set block (or twinned two-set block if you prefer) were twin worlds that, famously, did not have any humans in them.

Later, Innistrad, one of Magic's most popular settings and sets (and one I wish I had been playing during - I'd love to play a Werewolf deck) would go the opposite direction - a plane without other humanoid races, per se, but one in which humans were constantly threatened on all sides by Vampires, Werewolves, Spirits, and Zombies.

It's always an interesting question to ask in fantasy - one of the most popular tropes of the genre is the idea of other races that are not human, yet are similar enough to be relatable. But it is funny to me that when throwing together all of these fantastical beings, it's easy to forget that we're putting ourselves into the mix.

Renown and Ravnica Campaign Structure

I've only really run one D&D campaign, but it has been going for a few years, and I've learned a lot about the benefits and challenges of free-form sandboxes, linear adventures, and letting players improvise (though I'm of course still learning.)

What I find quite interesting about Ravnica, and specifically the Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, is the inherent structure it lends to a campaign.

Each guild functions as a faction in which a player can earn renown. You'll generally only earn renown in your own guild (unless you're Dimir, in which the guild you've infiltrated thinks you're one of them.) Doing quests and missions for your guild will earn you greater status within it - you'll start to be able to bring NPCs and allied monsters with you when doing things for your guild (and sometimes just whenever.)

You can, of course, run a campaign with all the party members being part of the same guild. What this means is that the party should probably rank-up in renown at the same rate, gaining many of the same benefits.

On one hand, the book structures gaining renown as a resource to gather. Each mission you complete for your guild nets you, essentially, a renown point, or sometimes two. Ranks get unlocked at certain rates of renown, with the very earliest benefits coming at three renown.

I think there's a good question to be asked as to just how much such a mission entails.

I tend to like longer, more complex and multi-stage adventures. Right now my party is in the middle of some more episodic adventures, but for example, the one that they are about to start has four combat encounters and a bit of environmental and social interaction to get there - I suspect that we'll take two to four sessions to get through it.

Actually, it's for a faction that is partially inspired by the Rakdos - a faction that I created to allow chaotic evil characters to serve as heroic and altruistic function on my world - but that's just a coincidence.

The thing is, if you were to have missions like the ones I design, and they only awarded one renown point - and that only going to the party member who is in that guild - it means that it would be nearly impossible to hit those higher ranks.

So rules as written for Ravnica are for either a single-guild party, or one that does almost exclusively very short-term episodes, or both. Getting four party members in different guilds to 50 renown (which is where the ranks cap out) would likely make hitting level 20 seem quick and easy.

So I would recommend accelerating tasks for the guilds as you go. There are tangible benefits even at the first rank (which generally requires 3 renown) that you might want to build to slowly, but I think you could start being more generous with renown as the campaign goes on. A mission or quest could be broken into smaller component parts that each reward a renown, or perhaps you could just give bigger chunks of it as the players did higher-level missions.

To be fair, I think hitting the highest levels of renown is meant to be something level 20 players could still work on. You don't want a bunch of level 5 characters to already have access to swarms of NPCs under their command.

While Ravnica is set up very nicely for short adventures and quests, and you could certainly run a very episodic campaign, I'm always a fan of the longer, serialized stories.

You could approach this a couple ways:

One is the Buffy approach - you take episodic stories that touch on or brush up against a larger plot. Yes, you might just be clearing some Izzet lab of renegade weirds, but you also happen to find that one of the dead researchers had a note about some argument between Ral Zarek and Niv-Mizzet, giving you further insight into some grand plot involving Nicol Bolas (look the names up if you have no idea what I'm talking about.)

Another is a more strictly serialized approach - every plot is directly connected, but they take you all over the city. If it's a plane-threatening bad guy your party is trying to stop, it might be that anything you do to stop the big bad (like Nicol Bolas, for example) is going to please your guild, regardless of whether it's in their typical wheelhouse. This would allow members of different guilds to earn renown on the same adventures, which gives you some of the best of both worlds.

Of course, if your big bad is a member (or guildmaster) of a guild, it might be easy to have plenty of adventures themed around the villainous guild, and any guild that opposes it (which is basically the other 9 in many cases) would reward renown for foiling their plans.

My Weird Relationship With Nicol Bolas

When I was about eight, I had just started playing Magic the Gathering - indeed, anyone playing it had just started playing because the game was only two or so years old. I got a Royal Assassin in my first Revised Edition 60-card pack, which started my love affair with Black. (I was amazed to think that a 1/1 could possibly be better than most other creatures.)

At the time, it was common wisdom amongst my elementary school peers that Shivan Dragon was the best creature in Magic, though massive beasts like Force of Nature or Leviathan (or the Lord of the Pit) were also big contenders.

But then I heard about these particular creatures of special renown: the Elder Dragon Legends.

The Elder Dragon Legends followed the following formula: they were three colors, two of each color in an allied shard (in other words a color with its two allies) plus two generic for a casting cost. They were each 7/7 flyers, and each required you to pay one of each of their mana colors on your upkeep or sacrifice them.

Screw the Shivan Dragon, these guys were the best. Indeed, the inaccessibility of requiring hard commitments to three colors was part of the appeal (though, at least at my school, the very notion of not playing all five colors was foreign - we were kids and did not really understand the game that well.)

Anyway, a couple years after I started playing, a friend of a friend told us he had Elder Dragon Legends that he wanted to sell. They were from Chronicles, a re-release of popular cards from Magic's early sets when the initial run had been much smaller than there was demand for. Chronicles Cards were denoted by their white borders, despite having expansion symbols (in Revised through... some much later set, "Core Sets" had white borders.)

Anyway, he had a couple of the cards, and because I liked to play Black and Blue (we had figured out limiting our decks' colors by then) and also enjoyed a bit or Red now and again, Nicol Bolas was the one I picked up.

Now, having gotten a somewhat better understanding of the game, I came to realize that making your opponent discard their hand every time you hit them with this guy was pretty damned powerful - much more than Chromium's Rampage 2 (Rampage was a short-lived keyword that gave the creature +X/+X for every creature blocking it beyond the first.)

Still, even when I stopped playing in 7th grade and then picked it up again in college for a couple years, I didn't really give Nicol Bolas much thought. Magic's story had largely been focused on the Weatherlight Saga, which sort of started in Antiquities but really became the central focus in the Weatherlight Set and then the Tempest Block. There wasn't a ton of connection between stories after the Invasion Block, and when I picked the game up again in college, the focus was very much of individual stories on different planes - Mirrodin (which to be fair was connected to what had happened in Odyssey/Onslaught blocks,) Kamigawa, and the debut of the now-legendary Ravnica.

Nicol Bolas was my star player, even if getting him on the board was very difficult. But like most figures out of the Legends expansion, I didn't really think they'd put much into his story.

So it was perhaps a bit surprising when, following my second stepping-away from the game that Nicol Bolas would arise as what is basically Magic's big bad. While the Phyrexians came back for Scars of Mirrodin (sorry Mirrodin, you are basically hell now) and the Eldrazi gave Magic its truest Lovecraftian monsters, Nicol Bolas has had his story expanded tremendously.

It appears as if that plot, which has now been going for I believe a decade, might be coming to a conclusion in the current Ravnica block. But it is really odd to see what they have done with my coolest creature. The visual redesign turned him from a wrinkly humanoid dragon sitting in his personal wizard's library into an instantly-recognizable dragon whose horns have become an icon in and of themselves.

And he's been on a ton of other cards, many of them this now-decade-old-but-still-seems-new-to-me type called Planeswalker.

So that's been funny, but then in the 25h anniversary core set (I believe,) they actually brought back all of the Elder Dragon Legends: Palladia-Mors, Chromium, Vaevictus Asmadi, Arcades Sabboth, and of course Nicol Bolas himself (and yes, those names are hardwired into my brain so I don't have to look them up.) They're all new versions of these characters with far more sensible design philosophy.

Now all they need to do is update Baron Sengir, the patriarch of my favorite vampiric minions, and I'll feel like I'm a kid again.

The End of an Era for Acquisitions Incorporated

At a small-scale Acq-Inc game at the Penny Arcade headquarters, Chris Perkins made a shocking announcement toward the end of the game - that he was going to be stepping down as Dungeon Master and allowing Jeremy Crawford to take his place going forward.

This is after eleven years and ten levels of seeing obnoxious (maybe evil?) corporate bureaucrat Omin Dran, egocentric goofball Jim Darkmagic, and a cast of other memorable characters play through the latest D&D content, starting as a promo for the then-new 4th Edition.

Acq-Inc is not going away, and Perkins is still going to run Dice, Camera, Action (along with new Acq-Inc regular and core DCA player Strix.) But we'll be seeing Crawford take over the main show, which is kind of crazy.

Jeremy Crawford is the lead rules designer on D&D, so he's no small name, but I certainly have less experience watching him DM. It'll be weird not to have Perkins behind the screen.

Like it has been for a ton of people, Acq-Inc is what really got me to try the game, and it's a big part of how I think about D&D (I was a relative latecomer to Critical Role, but that's obviously also a big model for how I like to run a game - in practice my group is not quite murder-hobos, but also perhaps not as emotionally invested as the CR group.)

In a move that appears to be pissing off a lot of purists but excites me, the group gets transported out of the multiverse entire and to Ravnica at the end of the session. I guess that answers a cosmological question I've had about how Ravnica fits in as a D&D world.

Managing Dimir Characters at the Table

Hey, have I mentioned House Dimir is my favorite Ravnica guild? I have? Ok, well anyway...

In Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, each guild functions as a player background and a faction with which one can gain renown and thus acquire new privileges and rewards. House Dimir has these functions, but in addition you pick a second guild that you have infiltrated. While I feel there ought to be an option to play as one of the openly-Dimir-affiliated couriers, journalists, private investigators, or librarians, the main fantasy they are reinforcing with the background is that of the infiltrator.

A Dimir character will thus generally behave as they would in a different guild. In D&D's official Ravnica stream, the Broken Pact, for example (EARLY EPISODE SPOILERS) one of the party members is revealed to actually be a Dimir operative after appearing until then as a member of another guild. I guess I'll keep it vague, though if you know Ravnica, it's not terribly hard to guess which one it is.

But this provides a bit of a conundrum, or perhaps simply a stylistic choice for how you want to run the game.

Do you let the other players know?

Now, if the players are good at curbing their metagaming instincts, you could simply make it common knowledge and just have the players play their characters as if they don't know. In the Broken Pact, they have the advantage of having an audience to fool, so while I believe the other three players were aware, the first couple episodes treated the Dimir party member simply as if they were part of a different guild.

This is, honestly, probably the easiest way of doing it. Simply give the player occasional messages and meetings with contacts and potentially use that as a potential reveal within the party - something that will be a particularly big moment if you have an otherwise single-guild party.

A single-guild party consisting of all Dimir characters can also work quite well, and removes the need to keep things secret between players (unless you want a truly farcical level of lying and cover-ups.) Indeed, you could have a group that, to NPCs, appears to be a motley group of mixed-guild folks, only for it to turn out that it's all Dimir operatives.

But let's say you want a challenge. Maybe you want to keep it all a secret.

This starts at character creation. If you're having your session 0 with everyone present, simply announce that if a player wants to play a Dimir character, they should come tell the DM in private and simply roll their character as if they were a member of the guild they've infiltrated. Other players peering over the Dimir player's shoulders might find it surprising that their Selesnya Cleric has proficiency in stealth and deception, but that's on your Dimir player to keep on the down-low.

Where this gets particularly challenging is in play. One thing I highly recommend is out-of-game communication with your players. There's nothing in the rules that everything has to happen at the table, and so if you want to have your Dimir player receive their instructions in a way that the rest of the party doesn't know about, simply do it via text messages or in meetings outside the game.

For actions that do have to happen in-game, like using the Dimir-only cantrip Encode Thoughts, you can work out a signal ahead of time, like scratching one's temple a certain number of times.

Over the course of a long campaign, it seems like a player's party should probably eventually discover their true guild affiliation, but you should make them earn it, and allow the Dimir player to cover their tracks.

Giving your Dimir character secret objectives is a huge part of the fun of the idea - maybe there's an NPC that the party just wants to talk to, but the Dimir character has to ensure that they die, or better yet, get their memory erased. This then becomes a challenge for the Dimir character to achieve their objective without revealing what they've done.

With the rather broad spread of alignments amongst the guilds (and the potential for heroes and villains in each,) Ravnica has a great deal of potential to see players clash in their objectives and desires. But that's usually going to be more overt - a Dimir operative is going to try to achieve their own goals without anyone noticing. And that should present an interesting challenge, both for the player to do so and the DM to make it possible - and also possible to fail.

Dimir Guild Kit

So between having an excuse to hang out in my local (sort of - more that it was near the place I was returning tuxes for my best friend's wedding - Best Man duties, you know the drill) game store and a giant injection of nostalgia for Ravnica driven by the D&D book I've made definitely over 20 posts about (two series with a post for each guild) I bought the Dimir Guild Kit - one of a group of sets you can buy that include a deck of cards themed around the given guild with cards from all the Ravnica blocks, a guild-themed d20 life counter, a pin with the guild insignia, and a cardboard deck box along with a little folded note that, at least for the Dimir, has heavily redacted instructions (that are unfortunately hard to read as blue on black is not really the most legible color combination.)

The deck is of course the main event. It's ready to go (albeit after a lot of shuffling to make sure the lands and spells are mixed) and while I doubt it's going to be winning any tournaments - there's rarely more than two copies of the same card, not counting lands - it's a veritable who's who of Dimir legendaries and classic cards. You get a foil Etrata the Silencer, then a regular (but updated to current templating) Mirko Vosk, Lazav (the one from Return to Ravnica block,) Szadek, and Circu (I had Circu back in the day. He was nasty.)

Most of the cards have a Dimir sign for their expansion symbol, except for a couple of lands, I believe.

While it's not going to be the most consistent deck with its single-copies, it does look like it is going to really power you through some milling or other alternate win conditions (like Etrata.) You have a fair number of walls or other deterrents against aggressive decks, and a bit of removal as well that looks particularly suited to smaller creatures. I suspect that if your opponent doesn't have good creature removal and can't break past your defense quickly, the cumulative power of your many milling cards is going to be overwhelming, either powering up some of your creatures or just killing them in the old milling way.

Naturally with its milling theme, this deck is going to struggle against the Golgari, though there are also a few mill cards (like Circu or Dimir Doppelganger) where you can remove that advantage.

I am of course totally ignorant of the current metagame. Dimir has always tended to be a somewhat slower deck, except when it focuses on a kind of aggro-evasion theme - but even then it tends to be more careful in its aggression than, say, a Boros or Rakdos deck.

Kaldorei Vengeance and Giving the Alliance Some Story

Mists of Pandaria saw the Horde fractured - part of it remained loyal to Garrosh Hellscream, even as he descended further and further into an obsession with finding superweapons capable of destroying his enemies - both the Alliance and those disloyal to him within the Horde - and those who wished to see Thrall's vision of the Horde restored.

Horde players journeyed through Pandaria, first towing Garrosh's line but then siding with Vol'jin as the Darkspear Revolution began to combat Garrosh's frankly fascistic tendencies. It was a pretty exciting development for the game, as we had never before turned on our own faction leaders.

From an Alliance perspective, however, it was easy to feel as if you were on the sidelines.

Especially given how the Siege of Orgrimmar ended, there was a sense that the Alliance had merely assisted one faction within the Horde against another, and given what has happened relatively soon afterwards, it doesn't seem as if this effort really amounted to much. We once again have a Horde that is aggressively trying to destroy the Alliance. And this iteration of the Horde has been more successful. The destruction of Theramore was a big enough event to transform the Alliance's most passionate advocate of cross-factional peace into one of its most die-hard anti-Horde members.

On top of that, the Alliance came off as rather weak when you considered that they were essentially equal partners with a mere fraction of the Horde in fighting Garrosh's forces. If, for example, the Darkspear Revolution was forced to desperately ask for aid from the Alliance or risk being wiped out, that would have been one thing. But Vol'jin hardly even seemed all that thrilled to have the help.

We are seeing echoes of Mists in BFA, with another off-the-rails Warchief and another honorable hero of the Horde set up to become a focus for resistance against this tyranny.

While I do suspect that we're going to get a twist here that gives us a different story than a simple Garrosh 2.0, the same problem persists:

The Horde just has a more interesting story.

But that's where I think that the Darkshore warfront starts to make things a bit more interesting.

When Sylvanas and Saurfang planned the attack on Night Elf lands, (and it was really mostly Saurfang's plan, up until the burning of Teldrassil) the idea was to divide the Alliance politically. The thought was that if the Alliance would not send troops to liberate Teldrassil, the Night Elves might split from them, while if they did, the Gilneans might be angry that their lands were not liberated first.

Burning Teldrassil seemed to hamstring this plan - if the Night Elves had nothing to save there, they'd simply concentrate their efforts on other fronts. The attack meant to divide the Alliance would wind up unifying it instead.

And to a large extent that's the narrative we got in the aftermath of these events - Undercity fell thanks to this effect.

But that story seems to be shifting back toward the way it was originally planned - in 8.1, Malfurion and Tyrande launch a campaign to destroy the Horde forces in Darkshore. While Teldrassil itself is irrevocably lost, the truth is that the tree was a relatively new part of Night Elf society. Many civilians lived there because, until now, it had served as a safe harbor from the aggressive Horde. But the lands of Darkshore, Ashenvale, Winterspring, Felwood, and Hyjal are all very ancient Night Elf territory that they know quite well.

That the Night Elves have the right to fight to win back this territory is, I think, indisputable. Yes, there might be some questions about resource allocation, but I don't think Anduin or anyone else in Alliance leadership would mind gaining that territory back.

So how do you make this an interesting story?

I think you get some of the answer in the Terror of Darkshore.

Druids in WoW really trend quite strongly toward the obvious good-guy archetypes. They tend to be seen as more of the hippie-like, harmonious sort. Malfurion, of all people, has exemplified this sort of Druid. But in the cinematic we get previewing 8.1, we get to see a much scarier version of Malfurion and his Druidism. Horde forces are yanked off the road to what must be a swift and bloody end. One orc is slowly crushed to death by roots that drag him, screaming, into the earth.

Malfurion, benevolent though he usually is, is capable of gruesome violence. While the fact that it's just a bunch of Horde grunts may undercut his power, canonically Malfurion is one of the most powerful beings on Azeroth, and his anger should worry the Horde.

We also see Tyrande undergo a transformation in 8.1, embodying an aspect of Elune known as the Night Warrior.

While this transformation has an easily recognizable visual signifier - the usually glowing Night Elf eyes become black as night - we don't have a great sense of what, exactly, it entails. The Night Warrior aspect of Elune is clearly a fiercer one (it's in the name,) but I'd like to know exactly what kind of sacrifice this requires, and how it might transform those who undergo the change.

I think the problem Blizzard faces in telling this story is explaining what exactly has changed. The Night Elves have always fought to defend their lands. Merely showing that they are using violence to do so does not make the story any more complex - they've always used violence.

The point is that I think they need the Night Elves to be transgressive in some way. After what the Horde did to them, there's not much the Night Elves could do that wouldn't feel morally justified or at least understandable.

I've often remarked that if they want us to buy the Horde's constant antagonization of the Alliance, we need to actually see the Alliance commit crimes and atrocities that are not immediately offset by worse actions in the Horde.

But I also think we need to see the Night Elves committing acts that seriously alienate some of the Alliance from them. The Alliance has been in desperate need of an internal conflict so that their factional stories don't merely see them reacting to the Horde with a vague sense of moral superiority.